Vaughn Palmer: School closures are only a sacred cow in Vancouver

Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun columnist06.11.2015

Possible school closures include Admiral Seymour Elementary in Vancouver, B.C. on June 9, 2015. A sense of entitlement is behind the Vancouver school board’s long-standing refusal to address demographic and budgetary realities by closing under-capacity schools, many of which also need expensive seismic upgrades, writes Sun political affairs columnist Vaughn Palmer. One such school is Admiral Seymour elementary in East Vancouver.Steve Bosch
/ PNG

A sense of entitlement is behind the Vancouver school board’s long-standing refusal to address demographic and budgetary realities by closing under-capacity schools, many of which also need expensive seismic upgrades, writes Sun political affairs columnist Vaughn Palmer. One such school is Admiral Seymour elementary in east Vancouver.Francis Georgian
/ Vancouver Sun

Possible school closures include Sir William Macdonald Community in Vancouver, B.C. on June 9, 2015.Steve Bosch
/ PNG

Possible school closures include Sir William Macdonald Community in Vancouver, B.C. on June 9, 2015.Steve Bosch
/ PNG

The Vancouver school board should close 19 schools to improve its financial situation, says a special advisor’s report by Ernst & Young.Peter Battistoni
/ Vancouver Sun files

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VICTORIA — Faced with declining enrolment, the Greater Victoria School District in the past decade did what many of its counterparts across B.C. were doing and began closing schools.

A “dreaded topic” as one trustee put it at the outset of the exercise. Closures can separate schools from their communities, children from their friends, parents from their daily routines and trustees from their hold on public office.

Still, the Victoria board of education saw the pressures as unavoidable, given a change in the provincial school funding formula that was costing the district dollars for every incremental drop in enrolment.

Explaining the change for parents and taxpayers was the then board chairman Michael McEvoy.

“In the past, school boards were able to avoid facing these issues because the province funded buildings, regardless of how many students occupied them. In 2001, the province began financing school districts based on student enrolment,” he wrote in an open letter published in the Victoria Times Colonist in 2006.

“School districts quickly figured out that every dollar spent heating, lighting and administering empty desks was money that might have gone to funding more teachers, textbooks and special-needs assistants.

“The result was a wave of school closures across B.C.,” he continued. “Our funding is shrinking because of declining enrolment, and we cannot, in good conscience, pretend that maintaining half-empty buildings does not affect our ability to provide quality programs for our children.”

That line of thinking had already led to the closure of five elementary schools in the Victoria district and there would be three more over the next few years. Other districts responding in similar fashion included Saanich, Richmond and Coquitlam.

More dramatic was the result in Prince George, where the board closed 14 schools early in the decade and six more at the end of it, thereby accounting for about 10 per cent of the education ministry’s running tally of more than 200 school closures since 2001.

Then there’s the case of the city of Vancouver. Enrolment declines in the thousands there as well. But just one closure in response to the decline, and that happened a dozen years ago.

Since then, the Vancouver board of education has on occasion taken up the possibility of closures. In the most recent go-round in 2010, the board mulled closing a dozen schools, scaled the options down to six, but eventually ended up closing none.

The inevitable consequence of all that serial avoidance of the issue was on display in a story last month by Tracy Sherlock, The Vancouver Sun’s education reporter.

She found 71 of the city’s 110 schools had enrolments below the ministry’s target threshold of 95-per-cent occupancy. Some 36 were less than three-quarters full, and there were cases of schools with more empty spaces than students.

The low enrolment was concentrated on the city’s east side, including all of the schools less than half full. She further discovered that the emptiest schools were also high on the list for seismic upgrading, suggesting a better rationale for closing them since it would eliminate the expense.

Sherlock’s reporting on the problem of excess capacity meant fewer surprises on that score in the release this week of an education-ministry-ordered audit of the Vancouver school district.

The Ernst & Young report confirmed more than 9,000 empty seats in the city’s schools, mostly on the east side. By closing as many as 19 schools, the auditors reckoned the system could realize savings of up to $37 million a year.

The report likewise found many of the most under-utilized buildings were also in need of seismic retrofitting. By closing those instead of spending a fortune on quake-proofing, the system would save $150 million from the capital budget.

Anticipating the response from opponents of any and all closures, the auditors dismissed the possibility that the district was on the threshold of a surge in enrolment. “The current level of excess surplus capacity is forecast to remain consistent over the next 10 years.” Meaning none of those 9,000 spaces will be needed before 2025.

Also failing to pass muster with the number crunchers was the notion that the empty seats will be filled by recruitment from overseas. “It is understood that the majority of these international students attend schools in the district’s west side and accordingly will have minimal impact on the excess surplus capacity in the east side.”

The auditors identified a range of other savings, not all of them as persuasive as the case for school closures. Instead of selling school property altogether, it would be wiser to lease out the underutilized land and buildings for a decade, by which time the enrolment trend could be bending upward again.

But if past practice is any guide, not likely will Vancouver adopt most of the recommendations in the report, particularly including the closures, for such is the sense of entitlement at the city’s board of education.

As a longtime Victoria resident, I readily concede that the provincial capital sometimes acts as if the rules that apply to other communities needn’t apply to it. Just get folks over here going on why there’s no pressing need to start treating our sewage.

Still, from this distance, it is hard to fathom how Vancouver has managed to deny the demographic and budgetary realities that have closed schools in the rest of the province.

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Vaughn Palmer: School closures are only a sacred cow in Vancouver

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